Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Leaked Stanford Talk

What a tremendous lack of self-awareness. Let’s put aside all the leadership issues, all the politics, all the complacency, all the bureaucracy, and blame people for working from home.

(Not saying there aren’t folks at Google who are just cruising, etc… but that’s a fraction of the problem compared to the leadership issues)

– dart lost to typescript on web

– angular lost to react

– tensorflow looks like currently loosing to pytorch – seems like google got bored and more development is for JAX, Keras wrapper (0)

– IMHO flutter will loose with react-native or kotlin compose multiplatform – compare github insights for details

Meta on the other hand kickstarted open source Llama community. In this situation it’s hard to bet on Gemmini or Gemma as 3rd party developer considering google projects kill records. The only project they were really to bet on and invest for the long run without getting tired early on was Chrome and Android.

(0) https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=…

i believe this trend is a result of management culture and performance metrics that attempt to measure “impact”, and correlate pay and promotions along those measures.

It’s the same reason why google products die when they don’t reach mega-success (thus products getting killed off in spades recently).

Nobody wants to be doing maintenance on projects started by somebody else – so as soon as the lead visionary leaves for better pastures, that project gets languished, and whoever takes over it cannot use it to generate promotion worthy impact.

Schmidt still takes the gold medal in my estimate for destroying a company he ran by not understanding how the business actually works (as CEO of Novell he decided to screw their channel partners not understanding that the channel relationships were the company’s entire moat against Microsoft).

But it’s not like Schmidt had any strategy to bypass the network installers. He just decided to screw them hard so he could make a quarter look good, which lead inevitably to them deciding not to be Novell’s low-paid salesforce anymore, which lead rapidly to the vastly premature collapse of the business.

I could understand deprecating Google Domains for B2C, but for B2B?! What went through their heads?

Porkbun is my go to registrar now. And I switched my email to Migadu.

Meta’s performance reviews are also heavily weighted for measurable impact.

I think that the reason why it’s beating Alphabet in so many fronts is team culture. Most new product teams are small and have a reasonably flat hierarchy. It’s easy to make impact that’s both effective and measurable, and the amount of engineering time working in “useless work” is minimised.

That’s a big problem, a “support guarantee” could really help things.

Google is now a AD platform with a search engine to sell stuff.

I hoped a little bit in Fuchsia, it was the last one for me.

Their search could die and they’d still be the biggest advertising player on the internet by leaps and bounds.

https://www.voronoiapp.com/business/Breaking-down-Googles-Q1…

Facebook makes much more money than 19% of Google.

Edit: And I wonder why I got downvoted for being right, many here just blindly believe that Google gets their money from ads on third party sites when most of it comes from search.

But I guess your second post is right, it isn’t close, Facebook would be much bigger.

On the other hand there’s zero desire at Google to try and build the best phone. They have conceded that to Apple a long time ago.

No desire to be number one in Cloud. They are fighting for number 3 spot.

They are the Xerox of AI with a full stack solution. If they had the drive they would be HYPING THE SHIT out of TPU and making it the best solution to run all the real workloads people have.

Guess what. On average a Googler even still today with low bar to entry is probably 10 IQ points higher than average Amazon or Microsoft or Apple. But no; no drive.

> tensorflow looks like currently loosing to pytorch – seems like google got bored and more development is for JAX, Keras wrapper

Well, TensorFlow doesn’t “look like currently losing”, it has already lost since a long time. I haven’t seen a decent paper release code in TensorFlow in years, and all the references I see to TF online are job posts from “older” companies (to the point that, if you are looking for a job in data science, seeing TF mentioned in the job post is kind of a red flag of a place you don’t want to be).

That said, I am quite certain that this has only a small impact on why Google is losing terrain, and even on why it is behind in AI (which is also debatable: narrative aside, Gemini is not that much lacking behind competitors). Certainly if TensorFlow + TPUs turned out to be better than PyTorch + GPUs they would have had a lead to start from, but if that was so important, Meta or NVIDIA would have created the first LLM, not OpenAI.

Simply, sometimes stuff happens, you can’t predict it all.

This is a weird take. It might pertain to 2020 during Covid when Meta encouraged remote working, but it’s not like that anymore. Interviews were always leetcode focused so nothing changed there.

Meta is an interesting comparison because the performance culture has historically been way tougher than Google (sans Covid years). It’s quite a shock for a lot of Xooglers who join. One Xoogler at Meta who told me they only used to work 4-6 hours a day at Google. That is basically impossible in Meta – you have to constantly prove your value and the perf bar is high.

I think Google is changing now though and I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see them adopt Meta/Amazon style perf cultures in the future.

Source: I work at Meta, and have close friends at Google.

Tensorflow is a symbolic framework, which is less intuitive to work with for most people than the Pytorch. Not to mention the errors Tensorflow generates are more annoying to debug (again more an issue with the fact that it’s symbolic than any lack of effort on part of Google)

Google tried to fix it by introducing an eager mode in Tensorflow but by then it was too late.

And the fix was “new major version with a fundamentally different programming paradigm”

But it turns out when your users are irritated with your product, and you tell them to change to a fundamentally different programming paradigm, the new programming paradigm they change to might not be yours.

Typescript is a superset of javascript, Dart isn’t (though it transpiles).
Flutter implements its own widgets, react native controls native widgets.

Google seems to have a deep-seated distrust for programming language theory, as well as a deep-seated distrust for its users. This combination produces awkward software and APIs that ignore modern PLT and take a “Google knows best” approach.

Every meeting I attend with them has one or two engineers(1) struggling to breathe because there are at least 6 or 7 sales people, relationship managers or other non-doing non-technical middle-management spreadsheet jockeys stealing all the oxygen in the room.(2)

I can only imagine how terrible it is to work there given that these folks have all the power internally. I’ve genuinely never dealt with an organization that seems this bad.

(1) who are usually pretty good.

(2) It’s an internal joke at my enterprise how every meeting another new person from google shows up introduces themselves as head of some other microscopic facet of the corporate relationship.

Whether “work from home” is the cause or not, I think he is absolutely right on the latter part of his sentence, that contrary to startups, almost no individual at Google has the fire or drive in them to play to win. If you are young and you go work at Google, they will beat that fire out of you very quickly. “Work” from home is just one way that nobody-cares attitude is manifesting itself. (BTW, that attitude is by no means exclusive to ICs; definitely leadership has it as well, perhaps more so.)

Yes, that’s why you go to large megacorps. I wouldn’t go to Oracle, IBM, Google, Facebook, MS, etc. etc. if I had a “huge fire or a drive to win”. Honestly, I go there because I wanna work 5 hours a day (less if possible) and have a stable career.

If I want to work 9-12h a day, give me an upside. None of these huge megacorps will reward that.

If I’m the lead of a Goog project that becomes a hit, do I get $10M bonus? Of course not. I get a pat on the back and something to put in my packet for the next promotion interview.

So you’re absolutely right, but the problem is not in people. It’s in the way the system’s designed.

Seems like you might want to consider the finance industry.

If you make something important 5% faster, you bet you are getting a few years worth of salary as bonus.

System was designed by the people, more specifically people with ability to make decisions a.k.a management

There might not have been one person making all the wrong decisions. But more like lots of small wrong decisions, but it doesn’t reduce the fact that it is management that is always responsible for the state of affairs.

I agree that many want the stable and low hours career but how many people at these big companies are getting that? I mostly see it as a FOB farm and trying to overwork the overwhelming majority of workers at these companies. For all the stories of people working five hours a day and making $400k/yr – I hear many more working 60 hour weeks.

> If I want to work 9-12h a day, give me an upside. None of these huge megacorps will reward that.

I don’t really see startups rewarding that much either. Maybe it’s more rewarding if you’re a founder. I’m speaking as someone who has been an early engineer at startups and gone public with them. I still don’t see them as that rewarding unless you’re a founder.

Also, incentives aren’t the same. You might make a great thing but unless you’re near the top – you’re probably not going to get properly rewarded regardless of how good your ideas and whatnot are. People at the top will steal credit because that’s what they do. (“Look at how good I am at hiring/managing/inspiring/etc.”)

This is absolutely right. For every senior person in a glamorous role at a FAANG making $400k/yr, there are probably five less senior, less glamorous people making $150k/yr, grinding away trying to justify a promotion to the next level. The people posting to HN that their brother’s girlfriend’s nephew’s roommate makes $400k think that’s every FAANG developer.

Levels gives a clear direction that if you work at big tech as an engineer, you’ll usually make decent to good income. Whether it’s worth the WLB/PIPing/misery is what you have to figure out.

There’s a reason a ton of the people at FAANG are all on H1B. It’s not a lack of domestic talent – it’s a lack of Americans willing to be worked that hard and go through insane hoops to get said jobs. (justifiably so btw) I think a large reason why most of the crowd at FAANG is way more autistic than average is because autists can put up with such insane working conditions/hoops. Either cause they enjoy it or because they just have something about them that allows them to ignore it. I’m not even going to get in on how so many people in SV are also on various stimulants.

Google has severe cultural problems and the responsibility for that should be assumed by the leadership.

That said, it is up to the individual to work at Google or not, so it’s not like they are a self-selecting population of maximally driven people. At least not the recently-joined folks.

By and large, Google is branded as the company people choose to go and coast maximally recently.

I don’t agree, but there are challenges at Google that don’t exist in other large companies.

Google’s monorepo along with the ‘bottom up’ driven culture means that to enact any non trivial change, you need many sign-offs, which means an iron clad design doc, and either you have to be brave enough to make huge disparate changes across other teams codebasse, OR to wait multiple quarters to have respective teams execute.

Sometimes this is awesome, and it means you can do really complex things over the course of a year.

Often, it just means experimenting with non trivial changes takes 3x longer than it would at say Amazon or more silo’d companies.

No one with such a drive would stay in, or even go to Google, neither any GAFAM-like corp. Those have been the establishment for 10+ years now.

A large corporation cannot seriously pretend to encourage their employees to “play to win” when it is structuring itself against that precisely.

The bigger the corp, the slower, duller and more rigid it becomes _unless_ someone at the CxO level actively fights against it in a opinionated manner (which still doesn’t often register well with boards and major shareholders).

It may be sad, it’s quasi a law of physics for corporations. If you have that kind of fire in you, go first hunt into to the woods, don’t go to the factories.

I am not so sure it’s that cut and dry. Even among the FANG, the desire to play to win is vastly different. I’d say Apple still has that mojo. Facebook also more than Google although that ship went south post-2018, I’d say.

Tesla comparatively underpaid and overworked people but I think they play to win.

SpaceX even more so. Folks who work hard there are excited to do so because they feel their work matters.

There are non-monetary structural features of large corporations that make them different on that metric. I think the desire at the top to want to win in the first place is critical, plus the autonomy at the lower level to ship cool ideas without much roadblock or dilution of contribution among way too many people.

You can’t influence the course of the company (hence the ‘beating drive out of you’ comment I made). I am not root-causing the issue and putting the blame on leaf-level folks, just describing it. Quite the contrary.

I was riding a gBike (single-speed for those who aren’t familiar with one) ~10 years ago with my friend and I told him this bike is a perfect representative of Google’s culture. No matter how hard you pedal it goes the same speed.

There do exist worker-managed companies under capitalism, they consistently underperform. There also exist (and have existed) worker-managed companies under various forms of socialism, those were an utter disaster (for the workers themselves, for the environment, for business productivity, for overall societal welfare, for human dignity, the list goes on).

> How can you have “drive to win” if you are just an employee of a company, and have no stake in it?

Bonuses, raises, equity.

Of course, according to a metric, how much money I can make out of an investment, without having to do any work, they underperform!

> There also exist (and have existed) worker-managed companies under various forms of socialism, those were an utter disaster

This is simply not true. Where it was a disaster, it was for the similar reason, workers didn’t have the stake in the company.

> Bonuses, raises, equity.

Possibly but you have no say how these things get distributed, and they still are only a small portion of what the investors get.

> According to Virginie Pérotin’s research which looked at two decades worth of international data, worker cooperatives are more productive than conventional businesses. Another 1987 study of worker cooperatives in Italy, the UK, and France found “positive” relationships with productivity. It also found that worker cooperatives do not become less productive as they get larger. A 1995 study of worker cooperatives in the timber industry in Washington, USA found that “co-ops are more efficient than the principal conventional firms by between 6 and 14 percent”.

Coops don’t have the same incentive structure as external-investor-beholden corporations, so they don’t pursue “growth at all costs”, but rather survival at all costs (job preservation), and then growth where appropriate (pie expansion).

It’s kind of like the trade off between authoritarian regimes and democratic regimes. One is fast but flimsy, the other is slow but robust.

To start a business you need capital, if you have enough on your own, you do not need a coop, much more difficult to convince a group of people to risk together unless they’ve all had previous experience with one another.

> Bonuses, raises, equity.

And significant ones, too. None of this “Hey, you saved the company $1M, here’s a $500 bonus!” bullshit.

I once had a founder privately lament to me the this employees don’t play to win, and don’t “treat the company as if they owned it,” and it took all my willpower not to fire back with: “Dude, you’re the sole shareholder with 100% of the equity, what do you expect?”

They are by far our best bet at solving large coordination problems through price signals. Even though they are far from perfect. I do believe that free markets require capitalism (i.e. profits go to the owner of the capital rather than those who do the labour). But nothing there is against strong regulation, collective bargaining, and anti-trust. Nor is there anything about companies being soley beholden to their shareholders.

Also, ‘free’ markets can only exist with a whole bunch of regulation, and even then some markets (e.g. emergency care) can never be free.

See problem, fix problem. Don’t bring it to management. They are just going to tell you to fix it and then take the credit. Protesters confuse me, they are appealing to the cause of the problem for help and redress.

It blows me away how people bathe themselves in hierarchy. Its almost like oxygen to them. Of course, many anarchists become authority figures because of their raw affinity for getting shit done without asking for permission to think.

Great theory when it’s just a little quip. Not so great when it comes time to put into practice.

I have a problem, one of my coworkers is being lazy, he isn’t cleaning up after himself and his mess is becoming a general hazard (slipping, fire.) I try to tell him to fix it but he’s not concerned about the risks and tells me to fuck off. I can clean the mess myself, sometimes, but I have my own work to get done and he can create new mess a lot faster than I can clean it. I could try to organize other workers into a lynch mob.. err… I mean struggle session- wait no… I mean “intervention”, but this asshole isn’t responsive to social pressure and the people I work with don’t have the stomach for violence…

You know what solves this neatly? Going to management. And if that fails, going to government regulators.

By who? By what metric? That is a much shallower claim.

I would wager the guy blaming their middling AI development on “work life balance” was not well liked.

If it’s true? It’s a quote from the talk itself.

> it misses the entire point of the parent comment

Not really. I would say cheating on your wife with your PR executive is extremely bad for morale and an all around leadership failing. Just because sex is involved doesn’t make it tabloid fodder. I can’t just punch a coworker and call it “my personal life.”

More importantly, you’re ignoring the part of the comment that said he was extremely well liked, which was the baseless claim I responded to. You can say that’s not the point of the comment, but that’s just because acknowledging it weakens the argument.

Sorry, didn’t mean to be unclear – my “even if that’s true” was referring to the assertion that Schmidt wasn’t well-liked, not your quote.

Yes, he was married. Yes, maybe a serial cheater. Or an awful marriage. Or a great one. I have no idea. But I don’t care?

Dating a coworker (or many) when you are the boss and married is exactly what a sexual predator do. Being a predator doesn’t mean he “predate” on every walking thing.

Dating someone at work doesn’t automatically make you a sexual predator. That’s an absurd statement. Plenty of relationships start that way, and sometimes one of them is a boss, and companies have processes for these situations because they happen and the majority of situations are not due to predation.

Are you going to pretend we are not talking about the CEO here? CEOs dating subordinates at work are sexual predators, yes.

However, not every CEO that dates a subordinate is a sexual predator. Again, that is an absurd statement; life is never that black and white. Sometimes, people meet and fall in love regardless of their lot in life. Stating that anytime that happens and one person happens to be a CEO instantly makes that person a sexual predator is not based in any kind of reality.

A CEO that abuses their power or engages in any kind of non-consensual relationship is a different story.

I agree it’s generally a bad idea, because of perception, favoritism, the power imbalance, and a dozen other reasons. But it being a bad idea doesn’t necessarily imply that the CEO is a sexual predator, either.

Sometimes even people in power care about consent.

And sometimes people in power are predators. That happens too. Maybe even more often; I don’t have stats.

I’m not defending Schmidt. I have no idea about him or his sexual proclivities, nor do I know the details about any of his personal relationships. Neither do you. He may be a monster! But dating someone at work isn’t the thing that makes him one.

And yes, you are defending not only Schmidt but maybe yourself too?

Now that we’ve moved solidly from discussion to ad hominems, have a nice day and a nice life.

> why would his spousal relationships make him a bad leader?

How can you trust someone that can’t even keep their vows to their wife?

If you are OK with serious liars as leaders, thats fine for you I guess. Definitely not OK for me. Albeit for purely work performance, most of us can turn off our moral radar temporarily, mortgages ain’t gonna pay for themselves with just good honest heart. But that’s not a definition of leader, quite far away from that actually.

From talking to people who’ve worked/work at Google it sounds like a lot of the issues stem from too few employees dogfooding their products (especially hardware), and huge inertia to get anything off the ground/make large changes.

Add to that the lack of cohesive product direction (constantly deprecating and replacing messaging products as the main example) and you get Google.

IMO this came first and is a driver for people stepping back and defending their boundaries with Google. Most of the eng I know just cared about their work (some driven by the ladder, for sure). Google made it difficult and put a bad taste in people’s mouths about “work(ing) like hell”. Meanwhile, on the startup side that I’ve seen, people work a lot but in much more harmonious way.

I don’t know why we keep thinking about “GenAI” as a product. It’s an enabling technology that may (or may not) be appropriate for building actual products.

We should be asking “Is our company winning in Search, or in Shopping, or in Chat, or in Developer Tools?” Not “Is our company winning in GenAI?” This is like saying “Is our company winning in Python use?” It makes no sense.

There’s no incentive to excel. Either you’ll get laid off anyway or someone else will take credit for your work.

Might as well just coast. The severance is quite good, so there’s not even much motivation to quit, better to wait to be laid off.

I think Google is starting to become that. It’s just the nature of older very large corporations, I suppose. There are places to hide in these companies for non-productive workers.

What is not really about piyuv’s comment?

> There are places to hide in these companies for non-productive workers.

And that is where the leadership issue lies. Either because they can’t identify them, or can’t motivate them, or can’t fire them. Who is responsible for doing that? I don’t think it is the janitors. It is the leadership, very much.

My take is more Google having like a 80-90% share in search and browsers and email and phone os and online advertising probably wasn’t too worried about dominating everything and perhaps a little worried about being criticized as a monopoly. Hence them open sourcing the transformers model and instead working on protein folding and the like.

Now they have competition in GenAI they can take it seriously without looking like monopolists there.

Google had a decade headstart on several AI unicorns tech and did nothing but write a paper and say “No you can’t see the code, no you can’t use the model, oh maybe here’s a video of it working or at best a Google Labs project that shows a small fraction of its potential in a gimmicky way only available in the US and that stops working after a few months”.

Google will forever be playing catchup from now, where they had such a massive headstart.

It’s more of a “not even wrong” statement. It’s the kind of useless and reductive analysis poor leaders trot out from a position of personal frustration after failing to surmount the challenges involved in steering a complex, messy, human institution towards success.

It’s incredible how consistently this maladaptive “everyone just work harder!!” mentality crops up among failed leadership in institutions of all kinds and sizes. In this respect, Schmidt is no different to the average frustrated restaurant owner, blaming his business failures on his staff’s work ethic, “no one wants to work hard these days” and other copes.

Let’s say we go ahead and assume that long grinds and 100% in-office attendance is the only way a successful and highly engaged team can look. Getting to that point would still require leadership to perform the actual hard work of creating the right conditions and incentives for that successful, engaged work to emerge. Shaking your fists at the air and saying “work harder people! we need to win!” doesn’t cut it.

If Schmidt allowed himself to look more closely and reflect more deeply, he would realize that Google is and was full of extremely hard workers. But their “hard work” more likely took the form of navigating Google’s political structures and chasing up internal promotions and prestige.

If I had to guess, Google’s problem is probably that they created ephemeral written text as the primary solution for communication. It is neither good for speed nor good for documentation as a consequence.

Was this only to avoid the cost and annoyance of legal discovery, or was there some other reason? It seems obviously bad.

But many others cannot.

Yeah, like fairness is important in business. Let’s publish everyone salaries in the company and let’s talk about fairness after that.

Fairness is not important to businesses – it’s important to people (employees of the company). The other people aren’t blind. They see devs being able to WFH but they can’t. They’re not going to like that.

They’re gonna need to put up more money to get people back in the office then. Maybe even get rid of the open office bullshit. Remember when everyone actually had offices with actual doors?

Not only are people choosing the WFH job over the in office job given the same salary and benefits, but they’ll likely choose a less-paying WFH job. Your in-office job pay needs to overcome both the convenience and getting-people-to-change-jobs taxes now. Otherwise you are getting people desperate for a job or that aren’t skilled enough to land a WFH job.

So it’s simple: you ask for more, you pay more. We know Schmidt’s comment “Google decided that work life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.” is just trying to get more out of workers for no additional pay. Convincing people to work harder with words only costs time.

But companies aren’t doing that. They’re going the opposite direction and making return to office a threatening and oppressive response. Then they are also turning around and doing layoffs on top of it. Those who are good can go find a WFH job.

None of what the CEOs are doing coincide with what they are saying, and no one trusts them. Why would you actually want to do good work for a company/CEO like that? You’d just be saving them from themselves for no additional pay and a lot more driving to work!

This feels like a generalization which isn’t true across the age spectrum. I manage two products teams which are on opposite ends of the spectrum. One which has been working for more time than I have (10-20 years) and another which got their first jobs right before the pandemic so most of them have never worked outside hybrid settings. Both teams work on the same complexity and produce similar products (model optimizations mostly). These are not skunk works teams either, they are coming up with new models for lithography machines. These products run on most semiconductor fabs in the world.

I observe the younger team is way better than anyone else at remote work. Even the other more senior teams in my department. They are in fact the more social team, sometimes even I can’t keep up with their in jokes. I’m not surprised, most of these people grew up with the internet (I had some teenage years without it). Many of their personal relationships are also online.

To put it crudely, if you find WFH disconnecting its a skill issue.

So imagine a non-arrogant programmer that actually does what you want and you don’t have to pay all that money to and there’s infinite supply of these programs.
That’s all within the next year or two.

…

Google decided that work life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.

…

But certainly in your lifetimes, the battle between the US and China for knowledge supremacy is going to be the big fight.

…

And one of the things to know about war is that the offense always has the advantage because you can always overwhelm the defensive systems.
And so you’re better off as a strategy of national defense to have a very strong offense that you can use if you need to.

And the systems that I and others are building will do that.
Because of the way the system works, I am now a licensed arms dealer, a computer scientist, businessman, and an arms dealer.
Is that a progression?
I don’t know.
I do not recommend this in your group.

…

And if anyone knows Marjorie Taylor Greene, I would encourage you to delete her from your contact list because she’s the one, a single individual is blocking the provision of some number of billions of dollars to save an important democracy.

I’m not trying to defend Schmidt, but you’re naive if you think the US shouldn’t develop AI weapons.

How would the world look like now if the US took the high road and refused to develop nuclear weapons and instead let Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia develop them instead?

I don’t think this is going to be reality anytime soon. In order for the LLM or agent to do what you want, you’d need to be able to precisely specify what you want and that’s a hard problem all on it’s own. And if you were able to do that precise specification you would be the programmer.

Not say the software developer paradigm won’t change but it seems very unlikely to become “make me a better google ads system” anytime soon. I could see getting to something were you are given a result by an agent and then can iterate on it, towards some solution.

no, you just need to vaguely know what you want, and get the LLM to produce something that you then examine, and crawl towards the end goal.

LLM’s could potentially allow fast iteration from a laymen’s description of what they want.

But I can’t find the bug. I get the wrong answers but can’t trace it through the logic.

Maybe it’s a dumb thing like a missing index increment? Or a missing assignment and I just can’t see it.

Maybe it’s easier to just tear down the mess and write it again.

This is how I feel whenever I deal with AI generated code.

Equally, you can ask the GenAI to keep asking you questions to broaden its knowledge of the problem you are solving, and also ask it to research the issues customers are having with a current solution.

Some engineers seem to imagine any non coder using AI will behave very simply ‘make me a new search engine’ . Lots of very clever people (who just don’t know how to or want to learn to code) will be picking up the skills to use AI as it gets better and better.

I can see AI being used to write far better requirements and produce amazing prototypes – but if you work at a megacorp, chances are (for now) they will want that code rewritten by a ‘human’ developer.

The other day I was looking into adding Trusted Types in the Content-Security-Policy header, which was something new to me. In my chat with Claude I asked:

“Lets brainstorm 10 a list of ideas closely related to this so we can think of anything we might be missing on the topic to consider.”

And that provided a good list of items to review to consider and expand out the sphere of thinking for the LLM.

It is an infuriatingly hard problem to have the LLM produce excellent results every single time, and have it just do everything and want it to read our mind and all the knowledge and context of a task. I think we’ll make some good progress over the next few years as agentic workflows are built out to mimic out thought processes, and the cost/capability of the LLMs keeps improving.

I’m no military expert, but wasn’t it exactly the opposite?

The attacking army needs to be bigger than the defending army and will suffer way more casualties,even if they are successful.

Iran just sent I-don’t-know-how-many drones and missiles at Israel like a few months ago. A few of them landed, but most were caught and intercepted in the air. Here’s the thing: if even one of them had hit, say, the center of Tel Aviv, or the old city in Jerusalem, it would have been a massively successful attack, even if none of the other ones had done any damage. The size of zero armies was measured in that exchange.

But even if those were real they would still not support Schmidt’s point that “offense always has the advantage because you can always overwhelm the defensive systems”. The Trojan Horse didn’t overwhelm defenses, it penetrated them and destroyed the enemy from inside.

In war, defenders can entrench more and more and a lot of work and planning is put into hitting either before the defenses are up, or not at all.

This is not actually one of the things to know about war. It’s about as far from the truth as you can get.

Something to keep in mind when reading his other pronouncements.

Betrays the reality of them being “serial lottery winners”.

The use of AI/robots in war is probably not a good way to ingrain into people how to avoid conflicts either: as sad as it sound, let them get a taste of it first hand, and that’ll probably calm things down more efficiently: not for a few hours/days, but decades.

> This is not actually one of the things to know about war. It’s about as far from the truth as you can get.

… Unless you are writing the rules of war:

“Secretary of Defense Ash Carter appointed Schmidt as chairman of the DoD Innovation Advisory Board announced March 2, 2016. It will be modeled like the Defense Business Board and will facilitate the Pentagon at becoming more innovative and adaptive.

In August 2020, Schmidt launched the podcast Reimagine with Eric Schmidt.(71)(72) In December 2021, Schmidt joined Chainlink Labs as a strategic advisor.(73) In October 2022, he co-authored a piece titled “America Could Lose the Tech Contest With China” for Foreign Affairs with Ylli Bajraktari, former executive director of the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.(74) In March 2023, Schmidt testified at a U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability hearing regarding AI.

In 2022, Schmidt was appointed to the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology, a legislative commission charged with making policy recommendations to Congress and the Executive Branch.(1)”

“Since 2023, Schmidt has been involved in building White Stork, a startup developing suicide attack drones.(2)”

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt

(2) https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahemerson/2024/01/23/eric-sc…

Remember when Georgia invaded Russia?

Germany got’s industrial base absolutely shattered while the non-defending US was able to use its industrial base to supply arms for 4 fronts (vs Germany, in Africa, for Russia, vs Japan).

That’s actually an endorsement .

I don’t agree with US involvement in Iraq, Afghanistan and many other places, but Ukraine is a obviously totally different from those. Marjorie Taylor Greene may not give a damn as she lives thousands of kilometers from Russia (or maybe she’s just been bought by Russian money), but morally she’s wrong. When it comes to Russian imperialism, the only right thing to do is help its victims fight back.

i’ve never agreed with MTG before and i think she’s a terrible person but i applaud her stance in this case.

I get that china is a direct economic threat. That’s obvious.

I also get that china is a philosophical threat on a level different to the Soviet Union (that was freedom produces more wealth than totalitarianism – which the US won.).

The problem with China is that the argument is much harder to win – china is doing well economically (kinda) – and has not given up its totalitarian control. Their argument was the Soviet Union tried central command economics whereas we are something something power of markets and chinese culture.

What gets me is that this is not something to win on the battlefield – this is something where we (being liberal democracies) need to double down on liberal democracy- both the production of wealth and the use of that wealth to raise the living standards of all its citizens – in other words if we think freedom is better we make it so fucking obvious we live in utopia it’s painful.

Yea that’s wealth taxes, yes it’s more spending on infrastructure and education and sharing the wealth, and teaching ourselves to aspire to better.

Not (just) having bigger guns.

If Chinese EVs were to be sold widely in the US, they would be less than half the cost of any Western-made EV and would take over the EV market. A future where Chinese companies own the EV market in the US with all of the American user data going back to servers in China- that’s just not a future the US govt. wants- no govt. (outside of China’s own) should want that.

Then there’s the whole Fentanyl epidemic in the US and elsewhere. That is largely due to Chinese chemical manufacturers who are selling the chemicals to Mexico and then those drugs are smuggled into the US. There are many to blame here but the US has been pushing China to ban the sale of these chemicals outside of China for a long time without agreement. China realizes this is important to the US and it’s being used as a key trade issue.

“doubling down on liberal democracy” got us to where we are now wrt China. China doesn’t respond to liberal democracy. They only respond to force or trade embargos, or tariffs. That’s what was learned as Xi decided to become dictator for life.

> A future where Chinese companies own the EV market in the US with all of the American user data going back to servers in China- that’s just not a future the US govt. wants

I agree, but why do cars need to send data to servers again? I don’t grok why Tesla does it and I don’t grok why BYD does it either. What’s wrong with the alternative where we allow real competition that benefits everyone, and then ban any features (eg sending data to servers) that the government gets nervous about? I don’t see how this is any different from the myriad of other requirements on cars (eg mandated safety belts etc etc etc).

I recognize that state-subsidised competition still isn’t fair, so I support import tariffs that match those subsidies, but any further and you’re just hurting competition and the consumer, right?

Thing is, super cheap EVs and solar panels is exactly what we should want. There’s a climate crisis going on and these things are a big part of the solution. With climate goggles on, to put import tariffs on the tech that’s gonna save the world sound batshit insane. We should want those tariffs to be as low as possible.

User data is valuable(1), and storage is now so cheap, for a modest sum, one can keep data forever without deleting(2), so keeping car telemetry/videos has virtually no downsides.

1. For self-driving training, or selling to market researchers, or intelligence services. I’m not claiming this is what’s being currently being done with the data, but how “value” can be extracted from it

2. Shout out to r/DataHoarder

Instead, we want/need to be protectionist of our manufacturing industries so that if we were to go to war, we keep our ability to make more missiles, planes, tanks, etc.

This (video)(https://youtu.be/BQ23sgi_mgw?si=3HOm3WeWKO7VJMzr) called <Is China’s High-Tech ‘Overproduction’ Killing Jobs In The West?> from Channel NewsAsia covers it. Highly recommend you westerners to watch it; there’s some really heavy handed defense/reasoning from the chinese side.

i say china is not at all responsible for the drug, except as a contract manufacturer. If china doesn’t do it, somebody else would’ve. China just does it cheaply.

The drug problems come from the cartels, and from the fact that US’s war on drugs makes drugs expensive, and thus profitable. There’s no possibility of humans relinquishing drug use – think about the prohibition and the problems that it caused.

I say, just allow drugs to be manufactured, and sold (under license and regulation) in the US. It’s gonna be like alcohol. This will take away the profits from the cartels, and they will stop buying from china. It will increase tax revenue, as drug consumption can be taxed (like tobacco today is).

It will also remove the stigma, and reduce drug enforcement costs in police. The only thing society has to give up is the moral high horse of drug use.

it doesn’t have to be safe, just legal. If people choose it, and fuck themselves up, they’re free to do so. They’re doing it today already, but with the added benefit of being illegal and force resources into a drug war against the cartels.

> all of the American user data going back to servers in China

There’s a long running argument with the EU over all EU user’s data going back to the US where there are no privacy laws or protection against surveillance (US constitution only protects US nationals!), so the US government would have more credibility on this if it recognized that.

How many independent innovations get snatched (sherlocked?) by big business taking the idea and making their own version, when they see a small player that found a customer segment a large company never bothered investigating?

When large sums of money is what’s needed to execute any novel idea to full completion before your competitors can, that money becomes just a version of ”IP theft” or unfair competition. I think what they are getting is a taste of their own medicine.

EVs were a mature idea a decade+ ago, but big money oil companies hamstrung it and big money ICE manufacturers argued it was not worth their time or effort. The Chinese market and leaders knew the fundamentals were valid and cornered the entire manufacturing market before it could be cornered by western companies.

Banning all the paths to growth got the US to where it is now. Everything China did to out-compete the US was illegal in the US – the working conditions wouldn’t have passed muster, the environmental damage wouldn’t have been acceptable, the investment in cheap energy was off the agenda and the focus on heavy industry was broadly against the policy position which focused on financialisation and growing service industries.

We can argue until the cows come home which policies were the important ones (it is clear that some of what China does is counterproductive) but a key factor was legislative restrictions in the West. That is the opposite of the liberal part of liberal democracy. A key part of liberalism is giving people freedom to better their own lives.

Lots of American newspaper articles disparaging European engineering and scientific work, disparaging European work culture, etc. Even now, if somebody here comes up with something they will be referred to as ‘scientists’ while others in the US will be referred to by name and university; and this stuff is on Wikipedia too. People like Håkan Lans, who in reality is a Polhem prize and Thulin medal winner, are presented as if though they were patent trolls.

This became less prominent– it’s still going on, but still slightly less prominent, so maybe the US is capable of calming itself down.

Since then, it’s become clear it’s not the case. China have found the loopholes, their lack of IP (intellectual property rights) enforcement and government corporate espionage have shown the relationship is asymmetric and to the detriment of the US.

Xi has also strengthened his hold on power dramatically, breaking with his predecessors gradual loosening of control. This leads to more risk of irrational ideological driven decisions such as war, maintaining prosperity is no longer necessarily the main driving factor.

Intelligence around Chinese military build up around Taiwan are concerning evidence of this.
The Chinese economy’s rapid growth is also slowing.

That’s not what these people care about. Someone like Schmidt or Musk would be perfectly happy in a CCP-like regime, as long as they can be at the top.

They were fine investing money in China when they thought the country was going to be a complete free market they could rule. That’s also why they hate the EU so much, because sometimes the EU is bothering their corps a bit.

Other than that, I’m genuinely curious about the origin of the “inevitable war that we have to win for humanity” sentiment. Where does this judgment come from? It’s perplexing to hear such a deterministic and high-stakes view being expressed in elite circles. I wonder what specific factors or events have led to this conclusion, and whether it’s based on concrete evidence or if it’s more of a narrative that has gained traction. It would be interesting to understand the reasoning behind this perspective, especially given the complex and multifaceted nature of US-China relations. Are there particular think tanks, policy papers, or influential figures promoting this idea? I’d be very interested in tracing the development and spread of this sentiment, as it seems to have significant implications for international relations and policy-making.

There is a line of evidence/thinking that says relations between democracies are a lot more stable. So if you make everyone a democracy there would be no wars and a lot more peace. And peace is what humanity (or each individual) aspires to be.

Unfortunately this may result in some degree of intervention or politicking that others may not like. Intervention, specifically, is forcing judgement onto others.

Regarding these elites, you could say it’s a calling from whatever Christian god that tells them to spread whatever good they deem it to be. But it may just as well be hubris, or human nature – a superiority complex that comes from being at the top of the chain of ‘merit’ and status. Anyway, it’s happened before. Even in the colonial times there were British who thought colonizing India was a 100% good thing for humanity.

> Freedom is better because it removes hurdles to more rapid evolutions of efficiency, which leads to better utilization of energy, bringing better material life for every human.

Anything taken to extremes is bad. The chinese that studied in America and decided to go back made such a decision when they saw things like school shootings and riots.

It seems to me that many Americans are personally sensitive about these issues of power. It’s also the case with Russia : I agree that Russia is doing terrible things, but people tend to see the Russian enemy everywhere. Cf the arson on train lines in France at the beginning of the Olympics: even here where people are normally rational, every single comment was focusing on Russia and ignoring other possibilities. But actually it was done by French far-left activists.

In my opinion, it’s not about communist vs democracy, IP theft, ideology, Taiwan, etc. Elites hardly care. These are just the topics used by the government to get common people riled up.

The sentiment comes from increasing competition from China in the upper value chain where these elites get their wealth from. These elites want China to manufacture phones for them. They don’t want China to design phones and sell it to consumers directly.

The same sentiment was found when Japan looked like it was going to take over the world economically.

It’s a lot easier for the government to get its citizens to become anti-China if they use anti-communist, IP theft, human rights, etc. propaganda. Commoners resonate with these much easier. It’s not going to work as well if the government tells you to hate China because they’re increasingly more competitive at high value things such as design and services.

Take Zuckerberg for example. He went in front of congress and spouted as much anti-china rhetoric as he can. He obviously does not want competition from Chinese social media companies such as TikTok. He wants TikTok banned. Meta even admitted that it hired a PR agency to try to connect TikTok to CCP.

Take Elon for example. He definitely wants Trump in office because he knows if Chinese EVs ever make it to American shores, Tesla would have fierce competition. Trump wanting massive tariffs on Chinese goods matters little to Elon. Elon doesn’t care if he has to pay $5 for a Chinese good at Walmart instead of $2.50. Only commoners will suffer. But as long as Elon gets extremely high tariffs on Chinese EVs, he’ll be happy.

For Schmidt, it’s clear that he has big ownership stakes in American tech companies. Chinese tech companies are a real threat to them in competition.

Now, some people may disagree with this on a philosophical level (libertarians for example), but it is what it is.

If you now just mass import anything and everything from a country with much lower “standards” (I use the term to encompass all of the above and whatever else), then it means your own working population get cheaper stuff, but suffer from the loss of jobs. Not only that, but it creeps into everything. Where once you were high value design, even that starts leaking out of society into a country willing to undercut you on “standards”.

This is all very well known, so I don’t really think it is much of a surprise that there is a push back. I’m just surprised that it hasn’t happened more and sooner.

Most of these drones on both sides, are either lightly modified Chinese designs, or have a very large percentage of Chinese-made components.

China has already managed to dominate a new mode of warfare and make a huge profit from it while supplying both sides of the deadliest modern war in Europe.

I could definitely get behind this. Sadly it doesn’t seem to be what people want, at least not here in Sweden. The dominant branch of political thought is more like something something power of government and Swedish culture.

Citation needed.

I think they’re predicting large military spending and are seeking the power, influence, and money that can come from being an early leader.

China’s GDP _per capita_ is still 4-8x lower than the US depending on how you measure it. Its overall GDP is just very big because its population is very big. Given the recent slowdown in the Chinese economy, it’s looking like it’ll take a very long time for per capita GDP (the living standards of Chinese people) to catch up to the US.

If your average Chinese person lives in a comfortable, well-built apartment that costs 1/4th of what it would cost in the US, drives a car that’s similarly built but cost $10k instead of $40k, and eats food thats the quarter of the price, could you convincingly state that he has the quarter of the actual wealth, even though the numbers would indicate that.

I live in a smallish east EU country whose PPP is supposedly double that of nominal GDP, yet whenever the prices I’m expected to pay for a Corolla, my shopping in Lidl or a Macbook are largely the same as what I would pay in Germany (as is expected from a customs union).

Even restaurant prices don’t match the differences.

note that the parenthetical isn’t entirely true. it’s a very mathematical measure of living standards, and sure, one number is much bigger than the other, which does mean something, but how happy are you really doomscrolling various feeds about how the world is doomed? The wrong person’s gonna get elected, you just know it. How happy can you really be knowing that to be the future? Or, hey, know anybody who’s died from fentanyl recently?

There’s a lot GDP doesn’t capture. Hell, in terms of buying more things and driving the economy, you could look at it and say divorce is good for GDP since everybody is now buying twice as much stuff, not to mention all the lawyers bills. Not sure I’d argue that it’s great for living standards though. so yes, let’s compare GDP for what it measures, money number divided by people number, and see that our number is bigger, yay. But simplifying that to living standards is lazy shortcut thinking. If a FAANG engineer makes $400k/yr, but minimum wage is $15/hr or $30,000, their average pay is $215k, which sounds pretty great! The living standards for two someones making $215k are much nicer than for the one person making $30k.

How much do you trust your neighbors? How about those city/rural/suburb folk, especially the ones the extremists on the opposite side of the political spectrum? That contribute to a good living standard?

GDP isn’t a good measure of living standards, it’s a neat number to compare, and means something, but it doesn’t define living standards.

China isn’t going to roll over because life is better in the US.

In the end it will come down to power and the ability to project it. You can do that a lot of different ways – politically, economically or militarily, but in the end whether life is better in the US won’t really matter.

1. China takes Taiwan

2. China dominates all chip manufacturing

3. China dominates the AI industry

4. China overthrows the US tech industry supremacy by dominating global markets

5. US economy collapses (It is not exaggerating to say the tech industry is the lifeblood of US economic growth, just look at the stock market)

The philosophical argument is actually irrelevant, since China isn’t trying to export its ideology that much beyond some alliances of convenience. China never tried to win that argument either, it just blocked off the internet with its firewall, and focused on building its economy.

China is first and foremost a military threat, then an economic threat. Hence why winning AI is so pivotal (AI drones will dominate battlefields and jobs).

Anyway, China dominating chip and AI will likely happen soon. They don’t really need Taiwan for that.

Perhaps Putin’s action isn’t as irrational as it seems?

How so?
Russia already controlled the whole of Crimea since 2014. Ukraine joining NATO would certainly NOT have changed the status of Crimea.

Putin’s action would have been rational if he had captured Kyiv in a couple of days or weeks, and managed to install a puppet government. IMO the whole thing was based on bad intel, lies, corruption and yes-men who told their superiors what they want to hear, rather than what was the truth about Ukraine’s defense capabilities. After that Putin couldn’t back off without losing his face, and obviously loss of human lives and economic damage mean nothing compared to that to him.

That’s your opinion, not theirs. The CCP has staked its legitimacy on their ability to “unify China” (take Taiwan by force) and they’ve been spending a great deal of money to develop the necessary military capability. This is true whether or not you think their desire seems rational.

And by the way, it’s not about computer chips. It never was. The computer chips thing is techy tunnel vision, tech people see the tech thing as the important thing, but China has wanted to take over Taiwan for far longer than Taiwanese chips have been at all relevant. It’s not about chips; it’s about national pride, prestige, and face.

In response to anonylizard:
“TSMC is banned from exporting high-end chips to China.”

It’s amusing that it’s US, defender of trade freedom, who gives orders to Taiwan, with who to trade?

“The Taiwanese want to be an US ally, and not end up destroyed like Hong-Kong, hence they’ll comply with US sanctions.”

Why would they want that, if they have 60% or more of their trade with China, share culture, and are closer to them? I think it’s also a misconception that Hong-Kong got destroyed, but I am not sure. Obviously it has not the same economic weight in the West as it used to, but that is true for all former colonies.

Look, I agree that it would be better if China was a liberal democracy (although I also believe that liberal democracy has only limited effect on limiting imperialism, as is obvious from the British and US example). But if the Taiwanese people will be forced to choose between economic depression (due to some more sanctions on trade with China) or losing democracy, I sure hope, for the sake of their future, they will choose the latter. And I am worried US will force them to make this decision, exactly for the reason of “national pride, prestige, and face”.

1. Because they say they will.

2. Their military spending backs up what they’re saying. It’s not just hot air from politicians, they really are committed to building the ability to take Taiwan by force.

If you’re using the economy as a weapon it makes complete sense for Taiwan to block those ties.

China is still far behind the US in high-end chips. Sure they are catching up. But China is on borrowed time due to population collapse. China will run out of young engineers far more quickly than the US will.

The first mover can have overwhelming advantages. If the US gets to AI first, dominates the global AI market, China facing demographic collapse, economic decline, will lose the ability to compete for supremacy

And the US can attract foreign engineers far better than China ever will. For many, many reasons, whether it is the language (English is far more common as a second language than Chinese, even though Chinese is among the top spoken as a first. And Chinese is ridiculously hard to learn, it’s not just the writing system, the spoken language being a tonal language is not helpful either.), the capital – US corporations pay better, the higher quality of life/work environment etc.

This is what happens when people foreign to Chinese corporate culture have to deal with it (the first link is about Taiwan but they’re not too dissimilar when it comes down to this):

https://restofworld.org/2024/tsmc-arizona-expansion/

> Chang, speaking last year about Taiwan’s competitiveness compared to the U.S., said that “if (a machine) breaks down at one in the morning, in the U.S. it will be fixed in the next morning. But in Taiwan, it will be fixed at 2 a.m.” And, he added, the wife of a Taiwanese engineer would “go back to sleep without saying another word.”

No, I don’t want to work for this kind of asshole.

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/quit-facebook-tiktok-biggest-diff…

> Although US and Singapore teams aren’t expected to do 996 — I work normal US working hours — the reality is that US employees still often attend late night meetings to collaborate with teams in Asia.

> The lack of process, mentorship, standardized performance review, and internal documentation means that it’s harder to learn best practices and mature in your profession.

Oof.

The US can afford a population decline more than many other nations of the earth, and it is continously draining brain power from the rest of the world. Many of the more talented programmers I’ve known as a French living in France moved to the US for greener pasture. Americans should not have too many worries about the future: if it ever gets bad for them, it means the rest of the world will suffer even harder.

There’s just too many of them, and there’ll always be diminishing returns, so at some point what they do will be alright even if it is slightly behind.

1. The U.S. fails to protect Taiwan.
2. All allies lose confidence in the U.S. nuclear umbrella, and they create their own nuke programs.
3. Japan and S. Korea produce nukes nearly overnight. Lots of other countries follow. We now have a much worse nuclear arms race.

China needs only one reason to make the argument for taking control of Taiwan. That’s national security. Taiwan is extremely important as a strategic island for defense of the mainland. For example, go look at a map of Taiwan airspace vs Chinese airspace. Honestly, I find it almost ridiculous that such a great power is boxed in so much by a tiny neighbor.

Personally, I think Taiwan needs to take one for the team and commit to reunification with China. That would cool things down significantly. Maybe the Chinese could even throw in some deals on borders to give the Philippines and other neighbors a break.

For example, if Taiwan built nuclear weapons, then the whole invasion idea is cooked and won’t ever be worth it and you can’t say ‘Oh, America is over there’ because it’s all Taiwan and then nobody needs to care about this anymore.

An independent Taiwan is a threat to their plans for military conquest, nothing more.

This is a much better solution, not worse, because empirically the only thing that stops countries being invaded is having nukes, so the more countries with nukes, the fewer invasions there’ll be.

That approach was already tried against Hitler, allowing Germany to reunify with Austria (Austrians were even willing), and then taking Sudetenland.

If you reward aggression, you will only get more aggression.

That is not true, punishing aggression creates more criminals, fixing their problems creates less criminals, there is plenty of evidence of this. USA rewarded Germanys aggression with the Marshal plan, rewarding aggression is great!

Another example, Norway didn’t want to be a part of Sweden any longer, Sweden rewarded this “aggression” by giving Norway independence. Everyone lived happily ever after, the end.

Happy endings are possible.

If you say that isn’t “aggression”, that is what people say about other separatist movements, separatists are always labeled aggressive and combative, somehow people always argue that separatists are never happy and always wants more, but evidence suggests that letting them separate actually can work and make both sides happy. So I am pretty sure that sometimes when two countries wants to unify you should let them, meaning “rewarding aggression” is sometimes the right play.

For example, if England instead of waging a war against Irish separatists let them separate I think both would be happier, but instead of doing like Sweden they punished the aggression and just caused misery for everyone.

Now about China you are possibly right, I just think you can’t say that you shouldn’t reward aggression in general, because often that is exactly what you should do.

The US no longer being able to print money (without massive inflation) out of thin air would force it to be more fiscally responsible like many other countries have to be.

Honestly, I don’t think so. And even if they did, they can’t do anything about it. Complaining will only give them a bad social score which will make their lives difficult. I think this is geopolitically irrelevant.

> China dominating the Tech industry vs the US makes no difference to a majority of the people in the world.

Economy, technology, industrial capacity and military power absolutely go hand in hand.

If you can’t get chips because the production is controlled by China. You can’t build missiles, fighter jets, drones or really anything. Not even modern helmets.

If China gets Taiwan, the US are geopolitically toast. That’s why the US will not tolerate it and will even go to war if necessary.

But then again, why does the US risk going to war with China over Taiwan?

You think it’s because democracy, liberty and or human rights?

It is very obviously strong geopolitical interest.

The West wants liberty and democracy to prevail in the world and doesn’t want to lose them, thus they care of their geopolitical interests. Who would have thought!

China can’t win a peaceful competition against the US in the long run, because China is undergoing total demographic collapse (Marriage/birth rates declining 10% yoy every year).

China’s plan is to sprint for the last stretch, while its population can still work.

As for the US, it is really held together by the massive wealth from its tech and financial dominance. Given the enormous social fractures today (please don’t forget that Trump was nearly assassinated 1 month ago), an structural economic collapse will mean civil war.

That great violence unleashed in various wars wasn’t actually necessary for realizing the goals of the countries involved is a very important history lesson which can prevent future violence.

(Similarly, one of the motivations for World Wars – who gets control of the colonies, seems futile in hindsight as the system of colonies was anyway dismantled.)

But that’s not what I’m claiming. I’m claiming that they were a big part of America’s toolkit in the cold war. To say that we won the battle through liberal democratic means is absolutely false. We toppled democratically elected left leaning governments time and again. Democracy was neither our means nor our end.

But that is not to say that X was the cause of victory. For too many cases, it actually lead to a backlash with regimes which were not friendly to US interests coming to power(Iran, Vietnam,..). Also, the USSR did similar acts (Hungary, Afghanistan) but could not win.

That the US prevailed owes a lot to its economic dynamism relative to USSR. (As an aside, US had a high tax regime and state-funded research during much of the Cold War, so the victory doesn’t necessarily validate a lot of the libertarian rhetoric.)

That isn’t true, taxes has remained constant since ww2. The tax distribution might have changed, but the total amount collected hasn’t changed much. Can see the curve looks about the same as always. The marginal tax rate barely matters for total taxes collected since there are so few rich people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauser%27s_law

Maybe you think that America and allies should have just stepped aside and let communist armies capture the various states, but geopolitics in real life is a little more complex than that.

Allende was democratically elected, no armed struggle from his end.

I’m not claiming that what America did was right or wrong. Sometimes violence is the right answer, maybe here too. But to pretend that we won the ideological battle through conversation and ideas is just factually false.

Parent comment is claiming the cold war was won through liberal democratic means. I claim that the tools employed by the US were violent incursions. I’m not claiming the US was violent for violence’s sake. They were calculated actions with the intent of smothering any left leaning movement in the third world. Specifically the Indonesian case is egregious because their communist party was about as left wing as Bernie Sanders, and still a US-backed genocide was carried out against (suspected) leftists in Indonesia. Similar with the case in Chile. This was a democratically elected center left president, and the US-backed coup installed a violent dictatorship for the next 15 years.

Africa were doing bad before white people intervened, answering why isn’t trivial at all. They did trade over Sahara, technological advancement and knowledge was there but Africa didn’t manage to take advantage of it unlike the Arabs, Asians and Europeans.

If that’s the case, why were so many Western backed regimes also antidemocratic and authoritarian?

The point is that lot of people seem to forget that the USSR wasn’t sitting at home, either, and was deliberately funding political actions around the world as a part of the Cold War. Whether that “justifies” US interventionism is a different question, but people seem to talk about it as if the US was acting in a vacuum.

The Cold War ended more than 30 years ago, yet the same “interventionism” continues? This is isn’t ancient history, we fought two whole imperial wars since the with the same exact thought process without the USSR even existing anymore.

I don’t deny that there was some kind of context to American imperialism and I have no interest in whitewashing what the Soviets were doing. But to say that these “interventions” were a purely defensive/reactionary measure against communism is silly, the US has a vested interest in protecting its hegemony control. It’s that simple.

But sure, powerful states want to protect their hegemony. Part of that includes not letting your allies turn into hostile enemy states. I’m not sure what else you’re suggesting such a power do? Let the oppositional force just take everything?

The opinion you’ve expressed here is just the typical cynical approach that seems to lack any understanding of real world politics, or the basic fact that people in the Western “free” world might actually have a legitimate interest in promoting freedom and defending their values.

I recommend reading biographies of presidents during that era, especially Eisenhower. You’ll learn about the difficult (and often wrong) choices those in power had to make. To treat their actions as simply some kind of imperial bloodlust is not even remotely historically accurate.

Again, I am in no way arguing that these various interventions were “good” or “justified” or what have you, just that the framing of them as purely militaristic imperial conquests is flat out wrong and uninformed.

> I’m not sure what else you’re suggesting such a power do? Let the oppositional force just take everything?

This is precisely my problem. If the US/West wants to maintain a moral high ground by claiming that their “freedom” and values are simply the best and everyone needs them, then why is there an incessant need to subjugate? There is no moral high ground with continuously destabilizing countries and making half the world’s life a living hell.

I’m happy to talk about the actual realities of geopolitics. Of course the US wants to maintain control, but that desire is a not a “moral” one.

To give you an example: the Korean War officially started when communist-backed North Korea invaded the Western-backed South. Had the South not been backed by the US, they would have lost – and indeed almost did lose.

Are you therefore suggesting that if the entire Korean Peninsula were under the control of the North today, they’d be better off? Because the reality is that South Korea today is more free and economically successful because the US intervened there.

Or what about Germany? If the US let the Soviets take the entire country, do you think Germany today would be the economic leader of Europe?

Of course, there are situations in which that defense turned out in the opposite way – Vietnam for example.

As to your last comment, again, this is just the typical cynical line that assumes everyone in the government is an evil imperialist that only pretends to care about their values.

You are ignoring the very basic fact that many of these interventions were done in order to prevent the very anti-free USSR from defeating the West. It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that communism would be defeated, or atomic war avoided. And so the people in power in the West needed to make very difficult decisions about navigating this game theory situation.

My main point the attacks happened for some other reason, it could be more noble but could also be more ulterior like economic control etc. They aren’t a raging lunatic that attacks anyone who tries to do left wing things, at worst they are a cold calculating evil villain that manipulates the world to their own benefit.

Edit: Sweden started transitioning towards worker based ownership in the 80’s, that is extremely leftist. Why did USA do nothing to stop them? Didn’t even sanction them.

> Wage Earner funds,(1) is a socialist version of sovereign wealth funds whereby the Swedish government taxed a proportion of company profits and put into special funds charged to buy shares in listed Swedish companies, with the goal of gradually transferring ownership in medium to large companies from private to collective employee ownership.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_funds

So there, clear proof USA didn’t mindlessly commit hostilities against any country doing anything leftist. So you were just wrong here.

If the US tries to prevent it, that’s a package of huge “war-like anti-Chinese (government) sentiment” ramifications that should’ve been grappled with a decade ago.

If the US doesn’t prevent it, Pax Americana is officially over, and the world will know what the collapse of World Order really looks like and what that means for the diminishing prosperity that first worlders are accustomed to.

This narrative that the US are the good guys and they are the police of the world is the propaganda of the empire. It’s coolaid.

I don’t think the Chinese or whatever other empire comes will be better.

But this Pax Americana is just lies. Go tell Vietnam, Chile, East Timor, Afghanistan, Iraq, and so on about it.

But this is “whataboutism” and not addressing the point of my comment.

The actual point of my comment is: the narratives of good guys / bad guys are silly propaganda.

Geopolitics were never about morals, unluckily for us.

Edit: for the record, by no means I like the Russian regime “better” than the west. Yes, Putin bad.

> The problem with China is that the argument is much harder to win

> What gets me is that this is not something to win on the battlefield

Authoritarian state capitalism already won this fight. Everybody is realizing that the marriage between liberal democracy and bourgeois capitalism is coming to an end.

For Western societies, the only remaining ways to assert dominance are 1) war & violence, 2) becoming more authoritarian themselves, or 3) a radically new way Western societies organize production and the distribution of wealth.

I’m not. What do you recommend me to read, in order to come to that realization?

From most measures China has peaked. Its state capitalism has gotten it a housing bubble and investment in industries with not enough customers. Combine that with its falling birth rate and high youth unemployment it would seem that the failures, not successes, are on display.